Questionnaires
The questionnaire is made up of two parts (see the appendix 4 - 7). The first part is for collecting participants’ demographic information, such as their language proficiency, experience of living abroad, frequency of interaction with foreign counterparts, position in the corporation and years of employment.
The questionnaires were disseminated both in hard copy form and online on the official website of an international university network. Online investigation presents a more convenient and effective way for researchers to communicate with others and to collect survey data.
Nearly 2000 printing paper were distributed to the MNCs, JVCs and FDI scattered in three different regions in China, that is, the Beijing-Tianjing Economic Zone in the North of China, Shanghai Yangtze Economic Delta in the Eastern part of China, and the Pear River Delta in the South of China. Unfortunately, adding up the collection from cyber collection, there were, in total, 218 responses were received, only two of which were invalid. Thus, 216 participants’ responses were coded for statistical analysis and entered into the computer database. SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Science) for Windows was used for the analysis, and the various statistical procedures adopted are described below (See Table 7.1.). But the survey did not stop completely, thanks to the author's work
convenience that the graduates from author's university and foreign visitors encountered with all being invited to continuing the data collecting. The participant involved into this programme came from mainly three resources: the author's students who graduated from the university in which researcher is working, the authors personnel networking, business partnership from researcher' social connection.
The other source of data collecting as mentioned in the previous chapter was to design a website and invited the related people to fill in and submit online which seemed more convenient and easier (see Table 7.2.). But the reality was not as predicted, data received through online submission were not as good as hard copies' distribution, and most of time, the submitted files could not be taken due to various reason, for example, incomplete information, obvious invalid candidate, non-Anglo-Saxon enterprises, etc.
Table 7.1. Distributions of Printing Questionnaires
Region Copies distributed
Copies Received
Time
Collected Categories of Enterprises
BTEZ 500 35 07,2013 Automobile, Manufacture, Pharmaceutics, Banking, etc.
SYED 500 32 09,2013 Banking, Insurance, Shipbuilding, Automobile, IT, etc. CPRD 500 28 07,2013 Textile, Chemistry, Banking, Garment, IT, etc.
HBP 500 15 01,2014 Manufacture, Agriculture, Telecommunication, Electronics. etc.
BTEZ = Beijing-Tianjing Economic Zone; SYEZ= Shanghai Yangtze Economic Delta CPRD = Canton Pearl River Delta; HBP = Hubei Province
Table 7.2. Distributions of Online Questionnaires
Online Website Year of Website designed and published
Duration of Data Collecting http://pro.ctgusec.com/questionnaire/public/questionnaire/en
http://www.ctgunews.com 2013 6 Months
A five-point Likert was used, with answers ranging from 1 (strongly agree), 2 (agree), 3 (neither agree nor disagree), 4 (disagree), 5 (strongly disagree). A corresponding score is allocated for each item, with 5 for strongly agree, 4 for agree, 3 for neither agree nor disagree, 2 for disagree and 1 for strongly disagree.
Several tests were run in the data analysis part for each research question. Generally speaking, a descriptive analysis was run to give a whole picture of the status quo of employees’ cross-cultural understanding. A multiple regression was run to seek
correlations among different factors, and independent T-tests and one-way ANOVA were used to find out the connections of demographic variables and cross-cultural barriers.
Interviews
Semi-structured interviewees were selected carefully. 30 expatriates and host country national (HCN) employees were recommended from 8 different types of enterprises, namely, MNCs, JVCs and FDI based on the Anglo-Saxon culture umbrella. The enterprises were located respectively in Beijing, Shanghai and Canton regions where most of the above mentions enterprises set its subsidiaries in9.The positions of the interviewees ranged from the chief director of corporate to Chinese chief executives, office managers and ordinary employees (See Table 7.3. and Appendix 10).
The industries from which these interviewees were drawn varied from manufacturing to international trade, tourism, life science, agriculture, automobiles, pharmaceutics, consultancy, food and textiles, thus representing most of the JVCs and FDI corporations in China today. It took the researcher a long time to select appropriate candidates. The experience of research proved that finding the right people to interview was not an easy job. Some of the interviewees were very cautious at first and quite reluctant to agree to be interviewed. They were worried that something private and secret to the business. Some were very cooperative and easy-going. All together, 30 interviewees with 19 expatriate and 11 HCN employees were conducted. Among the 19 expatriates, 5 are female, and for the HCN employees, 3 are female. More details about the interviewees are provided in the Appendix 10.
9
Overseas-funded enterprises in China are mainly concentrated in eastern coastal areas. Specifically, the largest concentration area of them are the Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta and the Bohai Bay Rim Area (especially in the area of Tianjin and Dalian), besides, Shandong and Fujian Province also have a lot of foreign companies. In Pearl River Delta region, most of the overseas-funded enterprises are labour-intensive, mainly from Hong Kong and Taiwan; In Shenzhen, there are some manufacturing bases established by Japan and South Korea’s big companies; In Yangtze River Delta region, a large majority of business investment is from Japan and South Korea enterprises, besides, a lot of Taiwanese high-tech companies set up the production and processing base in this region; As for Bohai Bay Rim area, Japan, South Korea and European companies are in the majority; Japanese-owned firms are concentrated in Dalian;The Korea-invested enterprises and European companies occupied large proportion in Tianjin; Korean middle and small-sized enterprises, with poor technology, credit and business conditions in common, are gathering in Shandong; There are more Taiwan enterprises in Fujian and the overall situation is still good; Shanghai and Beijing, the largest economic centre and the political centre of China respectively, focused on international business and financial industry, are becoming the first choice for the world's top 500 enterprises to establish their headquarters or representative offices in China; Of course, in Guangzhou, there are some large enterprises which are the first batch of entering China set up headquarters or representative offices in China.
http://zhidao.baidu.com/link?url=KrTGjOdU6Wa3E2k45WcPMNzZ3E4-4CXfnQmv1rNs8j0ny275QExAS_Pb9lfOF_U BNp4LF_Fuc9r4j0F_MqlbOK
Table 7.3. Number of interviewees in each category of enterprises
Number of interviewees in each category of enterprises No. Categories of
enterprise Number Countries Employees Job Function/Position 1 FDI in Life Science 7 USA 300 CEO/General Manager/
Division Manager 2 JVC in Tourism 3 Au 100 Department Manager
Quality Supervisor 3 MNC in Garment 3 UK 2500 Head of Team/Project
Manager/Sale Manager 4 JVC in Automobile 7 USA 1200 Sales Support/Production
Manager/HR Department 5 JVC in Agriculture 4 Au 1000 Project manager/Sales Manager 6 JVC in Shipping 2 UK 700 Engineer/Quality Control
7 JVC in Education 1 AU 600 Quality Control
8 JVC in pharmaceutics 3 UK 3000 Project manager/quality manager/ department director
To make the aftermath work easy to fix up, researcher has asked for the permission of voice recording, even sometime this request was objected by the interviewees. All the interviews were conducted in person by the author in Chinese and English depending on the need of conversation. The premises of interviews varies in accordance with the situation and convenience of the people involved, sometime the venue is at the workplace, sometime in the office, in the coffee shop and in the employees' dormitory. The entire interview started from the introduction of this research purposes and then followed the questions designed by the researcher. Interviews with expatriates were conducted in English except the interviewees is Chinese ethnic or voluntarily speak Chinese Mandarin. Related information, for example, the background of interviews' companies and product achievements were collected by the author from other channels and resources.
Attitude from the interviewees varies as well. The lower the position the employee held in the corporation, the more reluctant they were to be interviewed, and females were even more cautious than males. One episode was impressive: when visiting a food FDI in the city of Dongguan near Canton, the researcher proposed taking a picture with the interviewee, who was the director of a HR department: she agreed, but insisted that any signs or logos relating to the corporation must be kept out of the picture.
However, if the interviewees were introduced via some kind of personal relationship (guanxi), the situation was more cooperative. Trust was built between the two sides by the
third person, who generally was one whom both sides recognized. This kind of endorsement, for the researcher, was regarded as the typical Chinese traditional pattern for personal networking.